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Real public servants are free enterprising individuals who, inspired, embrace challenge, take risks, and create, sometimes big, and often, they create jobs in the process, all out of their ideas, and self initiative...

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Repost from Fox & Hound Daily: Why The Sky Is Falling on The CA Republican Party

[I share this because this past weekend at the 6th annual Congreso Latino, if you wanted to know what fueled this gathering, look at the song and poetry recital called the Floricanto on Saturday night. The headline for it was SB1070 & Texas HB12. There was also talk about State Rep. Virgil Peck's (R-Tyro) comment suggesting it would be a good idea to control illegal immigration the way the feral hog population has been controlled---with hunters shooting immigrants from helicopters.
Today, CA Assemblyman Tom Donnelley's office released a press release (To download PDF of the Press release Click here ), announcing a rally at the Capitol on Monday, April 4th at 2 PM on the steps of the Capitol in support of his Assembly Bill 26, the Secure Immigration and Enforcement Act (otherwise known as SEIA) modeled after the Arizona Law.
In the press release, Donnelly says "We need every freedom-loving citizen to show up on Monday, April 4th at 2 PM on the steps of the Capitol to support my Assembly Bill 26,..." Well, this freedom lover thinks not!]

By Allan Hoffenblum

Publisher of the California Target Book and owner of Allan Hoffenblum & Associates

In that article, I wrote that California Republicans can yell and scream all they want on the issues of taxes, socialize medicine, and corporate bailouts. But unless the California Republican Party is able to persuade significant numbers of Latinos, Asians and other people of color to register in their party and/or vote for their candidates, it will not elect a governor or any statewide official in 2010 and could very well lose additional seats in congress and the state legislature.

..."Maria Elena Durazo, the head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, heard this noise too and had the Federation conduct six focus groups composed of registered Latino voters who had cast ballots in the 2008 presidential election but did not always vote in gubernatorial election years...the number one issue on the minds of the overwhelming majority of those Latino voters was the Arizona anti-immigration bill. In fact, more focus-group participants knew the number of the Arizona bill - SB1070 - than the names of California's two major candidates for governor. And the issue was NOT illegal immigration, which is what most non-Latino observers believe, but racial profiling. The fear that Latinos as a group will be "singled out" by law enforcement, schools, stores and employers because of their skin color. In other words, the fear of racism. And the political party Latinos most identified with support of the Arizona law is the Republican Party. And this fear could lead to some serious losses for Republicans in 2012."

"If a widespread pattern of [knock-and-announce] violations were shown . . . there would be reason for grave concern."—Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in Hudson v. Michigan, June 15, 2006.An interactive map of botched SWAT and paramilitary police raids, released in conjunction with the Cato policy paper "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids," by Radley Balko. What does this map mean?How to use this mapView Original Map and Database

Key

Death of an innocent.

Death or injury of a police officer.

Death of a nonviolent offender.

Raid on an innocent suspect.

Other examples of paramilitary police excess.

Unnecessary raids on doctors and sick people.

The proliferation of SWAT teams, police militarization, and the Drug War have given rise to a dramatic increase in the number of "no-knock" or "quick-knock" raids on suspected drug offenders. Because these raids are often conducted based on tips from notoriously unreliable confidential informants, police sometimes conduct SWAT-style raids on the wrong home, or on the homes of nonviolent, misdemeanor drug users. Such highly-volatile, overly confrontational tactics are bad enough when no one is hurt -- it's difficult to imagine the terror an innocent suspect or family faces when a SWAT team mistakenly breaks down their door in the middle of the night.But even more disturbing are the number of times such "wrong door" raids unnecessarily lead to the injury or death of suspects, bystanders, and police officers. Defenders of SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics say such incidents are isolated and rare. The map above aims to refute that notion.